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Krishna Kumar

Research Associate, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge

Interests

Computational engineering

teaching programming

large scale software development

GPU computing, container technology

geomechanics

city scale simulations

My work

Krishna's work involves developing large-scale computational methods to understand landslides, earthquakes and other geophysical hazards. Soil behaves like any other solid material supporting thousands of buildings, bridges and power plants, but also behaves as a fluid and flows across continental shelves. Soil, unlike most industrial materials, is granular in nature, but is often assumed to be a continuous media for all engineering designs and applications. Krishna's research focuses on understanding the grain scale mechanics of soil and simulating billions of soil grains to describe the complex macroscopic behaviour of underwater landslides. Krishna is one of the team-leads of the Cambridge-Berkeley Computational Geomechanics (CB-Geo) group, which focuses on developing open source, large-scale, massively parallel computational tools for geomechanics.

Krishna also works on large-scale big data frameworks for infrastructure monitoring. He is involved in the development of city scale simulation tools to understand the effect of individual and collective behaviour on physical infrastructures and their changes. In achieving the goal of understanding urban activity, it is critical to appreciate how behavioural and economic incentives operate upon and influence human behaviour, to better predict responses from human participants in a smart city. Krishna is developing a technical platform which combines data driven machine learning algorithms, and computationally intensive urban simulations with real-time and historic data to realise the dream of a smart city.

Krishna is enthusiastic about teaching and promoting coding across various disciplines especially amongst school children. Krishna is a Code Club volunteer and teaches programming at Cambridge City Council library. He is a proponent of open source research and software development. He is interested in promoting container-based technology as a means to improve research software reproducibility.